Come to Mommy

"Mommy, I missed you!" Franklin's voice was raw with longing, ringing out in the empty, candlelit kitchen where his mother sat hunched over the table, hands clenched so tightly her knuckles shone blue. It had been exactly one year since the accident—twelve months since the black ice, the shattering glass, the cry that ripped her heart into bleeding shreds. He was thirteen now, or would have been, with the beginnings of a mustache apparent on his upper lip, freckles multiplying in the ghostly pallor of his cheeks. He hovered just past the threshold into the living world, his spectral hands reaching and withdrawing, never quite bridging the gap.

Marilyn had not seen him until this night, not truly, though she had felt the lemony brush of his presence in the shadows behind her eyes, the chill that pervaded the room when she lingered too long at the closed door of his bedroom. Now, with midnight pounding at the windows and the slow, rhythmic tick of the grandfather clock echoing like a summons, she saw him fully—sewn together from the fragments of memory and grief, perfectly imperfect, standing in the soft glow from the trembling candle flames. Her vision blurred with tears, but he was unwavering, shimmering in all his stubborn, adolescent glory.

Her first instinct was to run to him, to smother him in an embrace; but memory alone could not sustain that kind of touch, and her arms would only pass through empty air. She remembered the first time she held him, sticky and wailing, and the last time she wiped blood from his brow. The ache in her bones had never left her, growing sharper each day, until she was nothing but ache, nothing but longing made flesh.

Still, he was here. "Franklin," she whispered, the name tasting like a mixture of honey and rust on her tongue. "Franklin, my baby." She placed her palm against her chest, feeling her heart stutter with hope and disbelief.

He tried to smile, lips trembling, but it was a mimicry of the real thing. There was nothing to be done about the space between their worlds, about the rules that governed what could and could not be. Unless—unless she broke them.

"You don't need to stay out there," she said, voice thick with hunger and love. "There's a way for us to be together, for you to come home. You can possess me, baby. You can live with me here in Mommy's body."

The suggestion, flung out in the hush, sent a visible tremor through Franklin, a crackling that bled from his edges, carving him sharper in the darkness. He drifted closer, each footfall stirring motes of dust in the air, and Marilyn, for a heartbeat, was afraid—the primal, animal terror that mothers feel when their children are changing, receding from the safe harbor of childhood into the wilds of something else. But she swallowed the fear because this, at last, was presence, not absence. She would take Franklin back by any means.

"I don't know if that's..." Franklin's voice faltered, an autumn wind rattling dry leaves, "if it's allowed."

Marilyn smiled, a real one this time, fierce and bright through her tears. "Who decides? We're all that's left. You and me."

He hesitated, the shape of him flickering, unsure, like a child on the highest rung of the monkey bars, calculating the risk of letting go.

"Will it hurt you?" he asked, barely audible.

She considered the question, rolling it around in her mouth like a smooth black stone. Already, she hurt in every way a person could, "Nothing could hurt more than this."

Franklin nodded, and the kitchen light warped and rippled as if underwater. Marilyn's body opened to him before she even understood how: a gasp, a shudder, the sudden prickle of cold along her teeth and gums. Her vision fractured, for an instant consumed by flash-pictures—his favorite sneakers, the secret stash of comic books under his bed, the cinnamon rush of Christmas morning. The throb of a scraped knee, the rush of pride at a spelling bee win. A mosaic of Franklin, pressed into every available corner.

Her limbs tingled with the humming of a thousand nerves. She was no longer just one, but two—herself and her son—cohabiting a single vessel, a single set of lungs stuttering in shock. Marilyn pressed her shaking hands to her cheeks and felt, inside, the pushback of another will. Franklin: uncertain, tentative, but curious, always curious. She staggered from the table, catching herself on the back of a chair. The weight of her body was doubled, minds vibrating in parallel, overlapping and peeling away like the afterimage of a candle on the retina. She saw herself from the inside and the out, a funhouse mirror folding in on itself.

The first thing Franklin wanted was light, to see, so she flicked the switch and let harsh electric brilliance banish the waxy dark. It hurt them both, but their eyes adjusted—hers shading, his devouring. The next hunger was for movement, the need to pace, to walk, to test the boundaries.

“Let me try, Mommy

," Franklin whispered from within, and Marilyn, never one to refuse her child, relented.

She relaxed into herself, or rather stepped aside, and felt her limbs recede as Franklin surged forward. For a moment, her legs quivered beneath her, and the skin on her arms rose in a rime of chills. She could sense him, trembling at the controls, poorly calibrated, as if her body were an unfamiliar instrument. He moved her hand to her face, tentative at first, fingers grazing her cheek as if inspecting a mask.

“Your skin is weird,” he said, aloud, but Marilyn recognized the echo—her boy’s private lexicon of wonder and disgust.

“It’s yours too,” she answered.

He peered down at his mother’s womanly form, the sight both familiar and alien after so many months as an insubstantial shadow. There was a sudden, thudding awareness of the shape he now wore: breasts heavy and weirdly foreign, ribcage tight and hollow, hips curving.

He tried lifting an arm and it moved with the strange grace of a marionette. He touched the soft planes of his—her—stomach. The gentle give of skin that had stretched to accommodate his own childhood inside her. That realization made him shudder. He could feel Marilyn’s pulse of concern, then her pride, and then, curiously, her embarrassment, as if she’d caught herself looking at something she shouldn’t.

He marveled at the weight of hair on shoulders, the tickle of sweat gathering at the nape of his neck.

But the body was still hers, ultimately, and for an instant she reclaimed the machinery of her muscle and bone. Marilyn took back control of her arms, moving with a will that was fiercely maternal; she gathered her hands to her chest, palm pressed flat over the thundering heart they now shared.

There was nothing sexual about it, nothing even remotely transgressive. There was only the hunger to feel, to confirm that she—Marilyn, but also she-and-he, mother-and-son—was present, embodied, real in a way that grief had nearly erased. Her hands, trembling in their new occupancy, drifted to her chest: to the convex weight of her breasts, which had once been Franklin’s first comfort, first world, first meal.

The hands pressed flat, then cupped and squeezed, as if to test the unfamiliar substance of flesh. The sensation shot through her like a current, prickling with confusion, memory, and a sort of raw, animal novelty. She remembered, with an almost physical jolt, the first time Franklin had nursed, the damp rooting of his mouth, the sharp sting of his teeth as he learned the difference between skin and nourishment. Now that same child, older and unmoored from the laws of living, explored the terrain of her body from the inside once again.

She wanted, with the fierce clarity of a mother who has lost everything, to give him the vocabulary of her own body: the weight and softness of breasts, the subtle architecture of hips and belly, the scent-memory of womanhood itself. She wanted to show him, gently—this is what you fed from, Franklin, this is where you slept, curled and warm, before the world ever touched you.